Sunday, August 3, 2014

Dr. Mads Gilbert

I've seen a letter circulating from Dr. Mads Gilbert, describing conditions in Gaza. It's here, among other places.

What Dr. Gilbert describes is heartrending - but know your sources. In the case of Dr. Gilbert, it's worth seeing comments by NGO Monitor. Here is an excerpt from an article entitled Dr. Mads Gilbert: Exploiting Medicine for Propaganda and Hate:
In 2009, Dr. Gilbert traveled to Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital as a member of the Norwegian Aid Committee, NORWAC, an NGO funded by the Norwegian government ostensibly to provide health care services in partnership with the Palestinian Ministry of Health. During the fighting and afterward, Gilbert repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians and invented allegations of use of illegal weapons, while making no mention of evidence that Al-Shifa hospital had been used for military purposes and also shielded the Hamas leadership...In addition, the centrality of his ideology was highlighted in comments following Al-Qaida's terrorist attacks on USA on September 11, 2001, in which Dr Gilbert expressed sympathy with the terrorists. Days after the atrocity, in an interview for the Norwegian newspaperDagbladet Gilbert said "The attack on New York did not come as a surprise after the policy that the West has led during the last decades...The oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with." When asked directly in the same interview, "Do you support a terror attack against the USA?," Gilbert replied, "Terror is a bad weapon but the answer is yes within the context which I have mentioned."

He has loads of sympathy for Palestinians, but the rest of us don't count, it appears.